I always wish that I would put more of my predictions in writing. At least the ones that I ended up being right about. Actually, even being wildly wrong can be fun. Anyway, here's one I predicted, but the formal announcement is missing some of the details that folks might not be aware of.

SirsiDynix, the seemingly last library vendor on the market without a detailed plan for a "next generation catalog," has made an OEM agreement with Brainware for a next-generation faceted search solution. The press release is online (pdf). The release is slated for Summer 2008 . . . I've been griping that 2007 was hardly "next generation" . . . next summer seems a long way off with all the new interfaces that are coming out all over the place.

Brainware technology will provide innovative fuzzy search, fuzzy logic, dynamic categorization, and other capabilities that will empower information seekers to discover more content from more sources—including libraries’ own catalogs, Z39.50 sources, subscription resources, digital collections, crawled web content, subscription content, and social networking data—than ever before.

SirsiDynix is a little late coming into the game with new interfaces, but Brainware looks like solid technology from a company based in one of the technological hotbeds in Northern Virgina . . . my old stomping grounds.

What the press release doesn't mention, but which makes the partnership all the more obvious (logical?) is that Brainware is owned by . . . care to guess? Tick-tock, tick-tock . . . that's right, Vista Equity Partners, the firm that bought SirsiDynix last year. Look here for other potential synergies. I'll let someone else guess the next one.

In other news . . .

. . . tangentially related to SirsiDynix, the firm's old CEO, Patrick Sommers, has landed on his feet at Gale Group. Cengage (does that rhyme with 10-gage?) Learning appointed Sommers president of Gale last month.

A bunch of my colleagues are dressed up today. I considered donning my khaki-colored dockers, denim shirt, and brown loafers, but was afraid that no one would recognize me as being a vendor. I needed too many props to pull off the costume, like some PowerPoint slides that look like a real website. I have mastered the ability to smile, rock back and forth on my feet while swinging my arms, and exuding that look of "Boy, do I have a solution for you!"

It's getting harder these days to determine whether what libraries are getting is a trick or a treat. We tend not to take "trick or treat" too seriously . . . as in give me a treat or I will play a trick.

Sometimes the trick is figuring out just what the heck is going on, like when two competing vendors join forces to offer products and services. We've seen this ad nauseam in the ILS vendor world in the last couple of years. It's even present in the open source community where openness is the shared structure despite the fact that the products themselves compete. This week, we see it in the self-check and security arena.

3M and Checkpoint have apparently joined forces. It's not quite a merger and I am still trying to figure out the techno-political ramifications of the partnership: 3M will be an exclusive reseller of Checkpoint technology, and Checkpoint will continue to sell directly to libraries. The partnership is described in this press release (pdf).

Reading between the lines a little, it seems like 3M is enamored of Checkpoint's technology, and Checkpoint likes 3M's support and customer service infrastructure. How they will reconcile their products might be akin to how the entire self-check and security market reconciles its standards, something that has been contentious for the last few years. 3M and Checkpoint are both on the NISO RFID for Library Applications Working Group, chaired by VTLS's Vinod Chachra. TAGSYS, an RFID maker, is also on the group. The extent to which competing vendors have input into the standard is unclear.

In my opinion, the discussion around RFID has been too philosophical (privacy, data leaks, etc.) and not technical enough (interoperability, technological lifespan, etc.). Establishing a relationship with a self-check and security vendor has too often been a life-long relationship for technological reasons. Interoperability is the only hope in being able to choose the right vendor with whom to establish a relationship.

I've never really grasped the whole "meme" thing that seems to be so popular in library blogs. When I see a new meme emerge, I feel as though I've already missed the boat—like the cliche of reading about trends in Time, by then it it too late.

As a lover of words and phrases, though, I am intrigued by what I would call lots of pre-meme activity—the use (and often over- and mis-use) of words that become part of the growing library lexicon. Recent examples include: seamless, disintermediation, open, and the like.

Borrowing liberally from Entertainment Weekly's "What's hot":

Currently, there are three words that strike my fancy—workflow, life cycle, and governance. Mostly, I've been thinking about governance. The not-very-well-thought-out musings (what else is blogging good for?) were spawned by two seemingly unrelated things. The first was a conversation with Roy Tennant about his recent move to OCLC; the second was this well-written post by Care Affiliate's Carl Grant.

Carl's post reminded me that the open source crowd often talks about "ownership" in sometimes dangerously loose terms—mainly vendor vs. free software provider. I think that the pejorative nature of the discussion plus the mis-alignment of "vendor" with "proprietary software" confuses the notion of software governance. What are Equinox, LibLime, and Index Data if not vendors? They cannot by the very nature of their wares "own" the software that they service. They can (and do, for the most part) govern the software that they support.

I've said many times that who owns a company is an important factor to consider when choosing software. I think that what I always really meant was that who governs the company is what matters. I have said this other ways—"not all equity companies are the same"—and danced around the touchy subject of ownership. But regardless of who owns the companies or owns the software, what we really want to know is who runs them.

The other angle on this has me thinking about member-governed organizations—ALA, LITA, DLF, NISO, and yes, even OCLC. Because I have had some level of involvement with all of the above, I've been giving lots of thought lately to the areas of "overlap," which is a nice humanistic euphemism for "competition." It occurs to me that the overlapping problems of these organizations are also solved by the thing they have in common—governance.

Why is it that membership in a group grants unfettered license to complain about the organization but creates no clear responsibility for fixing its perceived problems? Seems all too convenient.

Granted that scale, scope, reach, and even bank-account size of those listed above are all different. Nevertheless, whether proprietary or open, member-driven, board-directed, publicly or privately owned, the nimble, innovative, and well-governed will win the day.

It was about eight years ago this fall that I sat down to make my very first attempt at professional writing. I submitted my very first column for "Coming Full Circle" in Computers in Libraries. I probably shouldn't admit this, but I think I worked harder on that column than on any one since, with the possible exception of my very first column for American Libraries. I'm happy to say that the CIL article on digital preservation still has legs. I'm a little sad for digital preservation that the article still has legs.

I was pretty good in those days at making outlandish predictions about library technology, some of which were right on the mark, but I thought for sure that the digital preservation topic would be such a moving target as to render its content obsolete in a matter of a year or two. The problem, of course, as with many good things in this world, is that preservation is expensive and the return on the investment is quite distant.

I don't mean to suggest that nothing has changed in nearly a decade. I'm merely pointing out that the long-term benefit requires a long-term plan. We also need to keep in mind that the vendors that will involve themselves in this area will require short-to-medium-term returns on their prospects.

Most vendors cannot even think in the terms dictated by preservation needs. I recall talking to a representative from Adobe back around the time I wrote that first column. He told the story of asking the National Archives how long the files had to last. The NARA employee answered flatly, "Until the end of the Republic." Of course what seemed like a joke at the time was an important precursor to PDF for Long-term Preservation.

How sustainable is long-term preservation? And who does one turn to when trying to find expensive solutions to problems that the average person would barely acknowledge? Or, in this case, to answer the question of just how expensive the endeavor is? Grant funders. And thanks to the generous support of the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we can look forward to an answer from the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Digital Preservation and Access. The task force—co-chaired by Fran Berman, cyberinfrastructure expert and director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California–San Diego, and Brian Lavoie, an economist, preservation expert, and research scientist with OCLC—will convene an international panel of experts to develop actionable recommendations on economic sustainability of digital information for the science and engineering, cultural heritage, academic, public, and private sectors.

Like good librarians, we have already done a fair amount of work on digital preservation standards, such as PREMIS. The addition of this work could go a long way toward determining the long-term sustainability of libraries' and archives' substantial investments in and careful planning for the future.